Would you buy a haunted house?

Now that we’ve seen where the Top 10 Haunted Cities and Top 10 Haunted Homes are, it’s time to ask yourself, would you buy a home if you knew it was haunted? Or what if it had the potential to be haunted because a murder or suicide occurred there?

Would you buy a haunted house?

One of the upside is that these “stigmatized” properties often sell at quite a discount, since the average Joe is probably not going to want to live there. According to HGTV’s FrontDoor:

A 2000 study from Wright State University found that on average, stigmas caused a sale price to drop just three percent. But stigmatized homes were also on the market 45 percent longer than comparable houses.

ABC News makes a mention of Nicole Brown’s house on Bundy Dr. After her death, it finally sold after two and a half years and for $200,000 less than the original purchase price.

Stigmas though, seem to fade over time. Years after Nicole Brown’s condo was purchased, it was back on the market with an asking price of $1.8 million. That’s more than triple the $590,000 the owner purchased the condo for. And who would want to pay $1.6 million for the house that Charles Manson committed multiple murders in? Somebody did. The owner of the house held onto property after the gruesome events. Not letting what had occurred in his home get to him, he lived there for 20 years. When he went to list it, nobody thought it would ever sell. But it did only after two weeks and for multiples over the $86,000 he paid back in the 60s.

AOL also highlighted the story of a Minnesota woman who purchased a dated Victorian that is a home to many spirits. For her, she has been able to profit off of the ghosts that inhabit her house. In addition to writing books about her experience, she has given tours of the property.

If you are buying and unsure of what the home’s history is, eHow has a small primer on death disclosures:

California Civil Code states that a death that occurred on a property more than three years prior to the sale need not be disclosed to the buyer. Death on a property must be disclosed to potential buyers if the death occurred within the past three years and it was gruesome, offensive or otherwise would affect the property’s reputation,

There doesn’t seem to be any hard and fast rule on disclosing the presence of spirits – since maybe that could be a topic for debate in itself.